It is well-known that Neolithic man grew wheat, and some authorities
have put the date of the first wheat harvest at between fifteen thousand
and ten thousand years ago. The ancient civilisations of Babylonia,
Egypt, Crete, Greece, and Rome were largely based on wheat, and it is
highly probable that the first great wheatfields were in the fertile
land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The oldest Egyptian tombs
that contain wheat, which, by the way, never germinates after its
millennia of rest, belong to the First Dynasty, and are about six
thousand years old. But there must have been a long history of wheat
before that.
Now it is a very interesting fact that the almost certain ancestor of
the cultivated wheat is at present living on the arid and rocky slopes
of Mount Hermon. It is called _Triticum hermonis_, and it is varying
notably to-day, as it did long ago when it gave rise to the emmer, which
was cultivated in the Neolithic Age and is the ancestor of all our
ordinary wheats. We must think of Neolithic man noticing the big seeds
of this Hermon grass, gathering some of the heads, breaking the brittle
spikelet-bearing axis in his fingers, knocking off the rough awns or
bruising the spikelets in his hand till the glumes or chaff separated
off and could be blown away, chewing a mouthful of the seeds--and
resolving to sow and sow again.
That was the beginning of a long story, in the course of which man took
advantage of the numerous variations that cropped up in this sporting
stock and established one successful race after another on his fields.
Virgil refers in the "Georgics" to the gathering of the largest and
fullest ears of wheat in order to get good seed for another sowing, but
it was not till the first quarter of the nineteenth century that the
great step was taken, by men like Patrick Sheriff of Haddington, of
deliberately selecting individual ears of great excellence and
segregating their progeny from mingling with mediocre stock. This is the
method which has been followed with remarkable success in modern times.
One of the factors that assisted the Allies in overcoming the food
crisis in the darkest period of the war was the virtue of Marquis Wheat,
a very prolific, early ripening, hard red spring wheat with excellent
milling and baking qualities. It is now the dominant spring wheat in
Canada and the United States, and it has enormously increased the real
wealth of the world in the last ten years (1921). Now our point is
simply that this Marquis Wheat is a fine example of evolution going on.
In 1917 upwards of 250,000,000 bushels of this wheat were raised in
North America, and in 1918 upwards of 300,000,000 bushels; yet the whole
originated from a single grain planted in an experimental plot at Ottawa
by Dr. Charles E. Saunders so recently as the spring of 1903.
[Illustration: THE WALKING-FISH OR MUD-SKIPPER (PERIOPHTHALMUS), COMMON
AT THE MOUTHS OF RIVERS IN TROPICAL AFRICA, ASIA, AND NORTH-WEST
AUSTRALIA
It skips about by means of its strong pectoral fins on the mud-flats; it
jumps from stone to stone hunting small shore-animals; it climbs up the
roots of the mangrove-trees. The close-set eyes protrude greatly and are
very mobile. The tail seems to help in respiration.]
[Illustration: _Photo: "The Times."_